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“Joke”: Meme Culture, the Alt-Right, and Steve Bannon's “War Room”

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“Joke”: Meme Culture, the Alt-Right, and Steve Bannon's “War Room” This article has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication by TOPIA. Due to the importance of the subject matter, and the rapidly changing nature of the topic, the accepted version has been released. A final, copyedited and formatted version will be published at a later date. The Pandemic as “Joke”: Meme Culture, the Alt-Right, and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” Tad Lemieux and Stuart J. Murray “Pepe the Frog,” a now iconic memetic symbol of the alt-right, has become a global phenomenon [https://unsplash.com/photos/-cePvX96qBA] Abstract: This text plots the analogical and memetic conveyances of the COVID-19 pandemic by the so- called alt-right. Arguing that the pandemic stages a complex transgression situated at the borders of Chinese global expansion, Traditionalist philosophy, and online meme culture, and taking as instance Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic, we follow “the joke” that informs and deforms the claims of community, sovereignty, and truth. Keywords: alt-right; COVID-19; memes; pandemic; sovereignty; Traditionalism ` This article has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication by TOPIA. Due to the importance of the subject matter, and the rapidly changing nature of the topic, the accepted version has been released. A final, copyedited and formatted version will be published at a later date. Tad Lemieux is a researcher of contemporary rhetoric and sovereignty whose interests include shifts to on- and offline Arctic environments, far-right rhetorics, and digital interconnectivity in the context of climate change. Email: [email protected] Stuart J. Murray is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Health Sciences, and The Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @stuart_j_murray It’s not uncommon to read that the alt-right collapsed after the “Unite the Right” rally at Charlottesville. We certainly hear less from its core cast of characters, like Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Richard Spencer. However, it’s not easy to argue that something has collapsed, disappeared, or, worse, has been secreted and continues to operate underground, when that arcane something is so difficult to define. One thing that contemporary theorists of the alt- right seem to agree on, at least in a very general sense, is that 4chan has something to do with this difficulty—especially given the jokes that come from there. Dale Baren, for his part, has claimed that the alt-right emerged when the manufacturing of need in the 1960s—that is, the manufacture and advertisement of counter-culture as a route to identity formation—transformed from the infinite choice of identity to the nihilism of infinite possibility of cultural remix, and finally into the abandon of the screen’s void (4chan), so that any part of this matrix “could be refashioned, snippet by snippet, into a homemade culture of jokes—memes” (2019: 17). An almost identical story was told by Angela Nagle (2017), for whom 4chan’s joke was nothing if not the infinite maze of uncertainty. On both accounts, the joke is both the wellspring of a noxious anti-establishment, anti-immigrant, and predominantly online form of “activism,” and the counter-cultural pulse whose rhythm amounts not only to a complex influence on meme culture, but to the presidency of Donald Trump. Such a story may feel particularly persuasive, now, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and a Trump tweet on 29 May 2020 that contains nothing more than one word: “CHINA!” (Trump 2020). And so there seems to be some cryptic knowledge, some secret, or even some kind of joke informing Bannon’s multi-platform online show War Room: Pandemic, a far-right “news” and interview program ostensibly dedicated to covering the COVID-19 pandemic (Bannon WarRoom 2020). Bannon casts a long shadow of mis- and disinformation in the contemporary American mediascape, whether in his tenure as founder and chief chairman of Breitbart News, while serving on the board of Cambridge Analytica, or as Chief Strategist to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and later as White House Chief Strategist during the first seven months of ` This article has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication by TOPIA. Due to the importance of the subject matter, and the rapidly changing nature of the topic, the accepted version has been released. A final, copyedited and formatted version will be published at a later date. the Trump administration. Started as an outcrop of a different show called War Room: Impeachment, which followed Trump’s impeachment proceedings, the first episode of Pandemic was released on 25 January 2020, well before mainstream American media focused on the pandemic threat and, it would turn out, its overwhelming impact on everyday life. Just five days after Pandemic first went online, an anonymous user on 4chan’s infamous far-right /pol/ (“Politically Incorrect”) board made a post urging people to pull their 401k’s and protect their investments. Claiming to work for a brokerage firm with connections in the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the user warned of an upcoming market panic and collapse of the global economy, accusing the WHO, the CDC, and American and Chinese politicians of a deliberate misinformation campaign to downplay how infectious and widespread the virus would be: “The WHO is already talking about how ‘problematic’ modeling the Chinese response in Western countries is going to be, and the first country they want to try it out in is Italy” (Anonymous 2020). The relation between these two media events is perhaps only coincidental, but “coincidence” is a key to the esoteric “truths”—or secret knowledge—claimed by each. During the first months of the Trump presidency, the public was becoming familiar with a term called “meme magic,” which emerged during the heyday of the Pepe the Frog meme, an icon for the right’s “meme war” during the Trump campaign. At this time, and by “mere” coincidence, users on 4chan discovered an obscure frog-headed Egyptian god called Kek, an already familiar misspelling of “lol,” who was “portrayed as a bringer of chaos and darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the alt-right’s self-image as being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order” (Neiwert 2017). The joke of meme magic is that “by spreading their often cryptic memes far and wide on social media and every other corner of the Internet,” these jokes were by force of “spiritual energy” making manifest the intended event (ibid.). Behind the coincidence, an esoteric energy—a truth? If there is an arcane knowledge here, in the alternation of cause and media effect, it is not by coincidence that it is secreted in its joke. Indeed, there’s an old joke from 4chan’s /b/ (“General”) board where an anonymous user will lament an overall decline in quality, often referring to the way in which the forum is now overrun with “cancer,” a reference to the expansion of in-jokes to outsiders that undermines, as one of the first to make this claim put it, the “Racist/Egotistical/Heartless/and downright disgusting bunch that /b/tards used to love” (Know Your Meme 2013). In response to this claim, another anonymous user will say some version of: “/b/ was never good.” As with every staging of a joke like this on 4chan, the crucial recirculation of the punchline anticipates even the complaint so that, it often turns out, no real complaint can be made in the first place. It is the punchline that avows, always in advance, that the implied community of the complainant was never experienced directly. In the response, the user who complains is never old enough to escape being “revealed” as too new to really know the truth, and the joke is that no one who makes the complaint, and indeed no one who even responds to it, could ever have been party to the originary and true membership of the implied community. Even if the anticipation of the joke— ` This article has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication by TOPIA. Due to the importance of the subject matter, and the rapidly changing nature of the topic, the accepted version has been released. A final, copyedited and formatted version will be published at a later date. and the continuous process of making itself redundant—is how users disclose something of their history and presence on the forum, that something is trespassed the moment it is enunciated. The joke is that to say anything at all is to undo what makes the saying possible in the first place. “Don’t Tread on Memes,” and “Make Art Great Again” graffiti in France, covering Banksy and Steve Jobs murals [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Don’t_Tread_On_Memes%2C_Pepe_MAGA_meme_mural _by_the_meme_artist_XVALA_covering_graffiti_artist_Banksy%27s_Steve_Jobs_Mural_in_Calais%2C_France_ March_2019.jpg] This joke is analogically recalled behind Bannon’s head every time Pandemic is streamed on YouTube. On a mantel beneath a television that continuously broadcasts CNN (a joke of another kind), Bannon proudly displays the now iconic red MAGA hat of the Trump presidential campaign—a dead meme if ever there was one. As with the 4chan joke that adjures the ontology of a former glory, so too does the promise to “Make America Great Again.” But are these the same joke after all? Surely the “again” that makes this hat and slogan something of a punchline differs in content and spirit from the “never” (again) of the 4chan punchline. Whereas the latter undercuts the terms of community and origin, the former would gloriously reclaim both.
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